Weird Science ponders the inevitable stupidity of public transit

Weird Science rounds up the week's odd science news, including a bird-dropped …

You can make your own joke about batgirl and imagine that it appeared here: The title of this paper about tells you everything you need to know: "Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time." I really cannot think of much to add there.

We can all be thankful it wasn't a coconut-laden swallow: As many of you may have heard, the LHC suffered a brief temperature spike that almost caused a shutdown. Apparently, the issue can be traced back to electrical issues caused by a bird that tried to fly off with a baguette that was a bit too large for it. According to the official CERN statement, "The bird escaped unharmed but lost its bread." Nature has some very tongue-in-cheek reporting on the incident, and gets the scoop on whether the bird came from the future to prevent the creation of a Higgs Boson.

This is just the first step in computers' plan to eliminate humans: I went looking in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine in search of something that appeared to be perfect Weird Science fodder: a paper on the rise of hot-tub-related injuries in the US. That study hasn't made its way to the journal's website yet, but I discovered that one of the authors, one Lara B. MkKenzie, has made a career out of combing injury databases and identifying the impact of various risks, from the expected ("Rock Climbing Injuries Treated in Emergency Departments" to the unusual ("Golf Cart-Related Injuries in the U.S."). But the one that stood out was a dozen years' worth of data on acute computer-related injuries, which shows that, although computer use increased by 300 percent over that time, computer-related injuries shot up by 732 percent. Fear the machines.

We'll try to get you the hot tub data next week.

We're apparently an acquired taste: Back in the late 1890s, railroad workers in Kenya were apparently terrorized by a pair of lions that decided that manual labor made for a flavorful meal. Rumors placed the number of victims at anywhere from 28 to 135. Researchers have now gone back and looked at the isotope ratios in the remains of these lions, and found that one of them was getting about a third of its calories from humans in the last month of its life. That's a bit of a surprise, given that lions hunt cooperatively, and there's little indication that the others in the pack were also bumping off workers. The authors try to make the work sound scientific by using phrases like "prey scarcity drives individual dietary specialization" and "sustained dietary individuality can exist within a cooperative framework," but your Weird Science correspondant is convinced that the whole project was done just to get the title into print: "Cooperation and individuality among man-eating lions."

Public transit stupidity is a mathematical inevitability: This is something I see almost every day in the New York City Transit system. A bus pulls up at a stop that's so densely packed with commuters that they practically explode out when the doors are opened. Less than a minute later, it's followed by a pair of nearly empty busses, running along the same route. Apparently, that's a mathematical inevitability, termed the "Equal Headway Instability."

The authors of this paper create a model that can reproduce the equal headway problem, and then try various solutions under the assumption that the current behavior seriously annoys commuters. Unfortunately, none of their solutions—minimum and maximum waiting times at stops, limited boarding, etc.—work well under all conditions, and the authors recognize that having commuters watch an unfilled bus pull away is also going to piss them off. The solutions, not surprisingly, are basic commute manners: stand away from the doors, let people out first, and don't pile into an overstuffed bus. Conductors have been saying all of that for years—good luck getting impatient commuters to go along.

It's dead, but we still don't know how it got there: Charles Darwin, during his famous travels on the Beagle, stopped by the Falkland Islands and was surprised to find a wolf living on what were essentially mammal-free islands. Humans promptly hunted this natural wonder to extinction. Now, researchers have gone back to sequence the DNA from museum samples, and have found that it's a distinct lineage that probably originated in North America as part of the same species group that includes the maned wolf, and survived the big extinctions that wiped out a lot of North and South America's megafauna by hiding out on the islands. It's still not clear how it got there in the first place, though, given that they've never been connected to South America.

25 Reader Comments

We can all be thankful it wasn't a coconut-laden swallow: As many of you may have heard, the LHC suffered a brief temperature spike that almost caused a shutdown. Apparently, the issue can be traced back to electrical issues caused by a bird that tried to fly off with a baguette that was a bit too large for it.

I find it unusual that the design of the collider is so fragile that a bread-eating bird can cause issues.

There's a simple way to avoid people, in a hurry to get to work, getting on a bus that is full if an empty one is right behind. Simply ensure that they know, for certain, that the empty one really is coming shortly.

This could be done with today's computer technology, by putting a display with a map on each bus, showing that bus and other buses close behind it. Until now, people who waited for the next bus risked a long wait which would make them late for where they were going.

Originally posted by John Savard:There's a simple way to avoid people, in a hurry to get to work, getting on a bus that is full if an empty one is right behind. Simply ensure that they know, for certain, that the empty one really is coming shortly.

This could be done with today's computer technology, by putting a display with a map on each bus, showing that bus and other buses close behind it. Until now, people who waited for the next bus risked a long wait which would make them late for where they were going.

A similar system is in the midst of being installed here in Vienna, Austria. The displays are not in the trams/buses/undergrounds though: but at the stops where you are waiting. (Who needs to find out there is another bus coming once they are already crammed inside?) I do not have any numbers or statistics, but subjectively it's a big help. The displays alternate between the next 2 vehicles coming (which can be anoying while you wait 30 seconds or so to get the full view), and additionally show if the transportation is wheelchair/baby-carriage friendly or not.

They also have a mobile phone interface giving you an up to date picture while you ar on the way to the stop, or for stops without displays.

I almost emailed Dr. Jay about this. The article abstract, and the Weird Science post, both say Falklands rather than Galapagos. Darwin stopped in both places, but the reports from the Galapagos are now generally the more famous.

On my first trip to Toronto some years ago I picked up a map at the airport, got my rental car and went to work (I was there on business). In the evenings after work, using the map I had from the airport, I'd drive around town to get a look at the place. I noticed that everywhere I went I seemed to be behind a bus. If I wasn't behind a bus, I was in front of a bus. They seemed to be everywhere.

After 3 days of this I realized my map of Toronto was specifically a map of bus routes.

The Predictioneer's Game helps explain why people cram into one bus instead of spreading out into two or three. I'm not sure it's stupidity but a display of self-interest (rational actions); most of these people would rather get to work on time or early than ride comfortably. (Me, I generally leave the house early and would, were I in NYC, probably be at the bus stop early enough to choose the least crowded bus--but I like my space.)

Originally posted by John Savard:There's a simple way to avoid people, in a hurry to get to work, getting on a bus that is full if an empty one is right behind. Simply ensure that they know, for certain, that the empty one really is coming shortly.

This could be done with today's computer technology, by putting a display with a map on each bus, showing that bus and other buses close behind it. Until now, people who waited for the next bus risked a long wait which would make them late for where they were going.

This. We have some signs at the major bus stops here in Ghent, Belgium, that show est. arrival times. But they don't seem to show actual times, based on real tracking data. More like they just use the same times I can go look up on the schedules, which doesn't help one bit when the bus never shows up (for instance because it was early and left early or because it left late).

To me this is really a no-brainer. We can implement this easily with current technology in the city and it'd make everyone's commute a lot more pleasant. If you can so easily improve quality of life for just about anybody on public transportation then why not go for it?

In mass transit this instability is called "bunching". Since it only arises when there is a long sequence of stops which the vehicles transit as quickly as possible, it can be defeated by "time stops", at which the bus stops until a scheduled time: As one progresses from the beginning point or a time stop, bunching will increase, but each time stop prevents the bunches from propagating further downstream. This is used to good effect in the Seattle bus system, and most likely many others.